


Middle School

by orphan_account



Category: Original Work
Genre: and this is a more complete baring of my soul than i've done in a long, but it's something i wanted to do, long time, not really a story at all, this is kind of stupid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-21
Updated: 2014-10-21
Packaged: 2018-02-22 00:04:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2487170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My experiences in middle school. It's not all the stereotypes, guys.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Middle School

For the longest time, I described middle school as I'd heard it described; a hellhole of deep, dark puberty, where no clear ruler emerged and the halls were dingy and the people were bitchy, boy or girl. But I lived through middle school, too, and it wasn't so bad.   
        My fifth grade year, we made cricket terarriums out of 2-liter soda bottles, and I made heart-shaped ice cubes out of cream soda and ate them for two weeks. The crickets died before their time; my mother left them out on the back porch without water for a weekend while I was away and I came back to fried crickets. The cat ate them after that, and that was the end of that. The math teacher read Ms. Piggle-Wiggle and A Whole Nother Story to us, and I still want to read that silly book again.  
        In sixth grade, the other science teacher came and told us that we should always report bullying. We had to write a paper for the final, and we all complained- five paragraphs hand-written in two days! It was awful. That was also the year of the prepositions, when we all had to memorize them and Josh Kettler did it before anyone. And the year of the candy castle, which got sprayed with ant spray, and some kids ate it from its display in the library and got sick. I remember putting a sign up there, reminding people not to, but there were still bits missing when I got it back, rather pointlessly.   
        Then seventh grade. My first graphing calculator, my first and last gender-seperated class. Algebra II was good, overall, barring the dismal grades of the first semester. I beat the teacher at math Scrabble, the only one to hold that title, and we watched Jumanji and I ate seven doughnuts at the end-of-year party. That was also the year of the Talk in science; girls went to one room, boys to another, and they explained the reproductive system and periods via BrainPop. We left eggs to ferment in maple syrup (the yolks hardened and developed a film), made organ and bone shirts and wore them for extra credit, the teacher locked the door and turned on all the taps when too many people asked to go to the bathroom. In Language Arts, we did vocabulary with a knitted frisbee which Grayson Hickert was entirely too good at catching. We listened to my audiobook of The Red Pyramid, obtained on sale for $15 at the closeout sale of Borders, and it took too long but it was fun to read along. I learned saturnine and funanambulist and so many long words I can't remember now, but are still in my vocabulary. That was the year of Ms. Hartwick- oh, how I worshipped her. She was my favorite. Her room was always warm, and I met Kelsey first in her room, and we memorized all the counties of Africa and Aisa in small cramming sections and I made samsa for the class. I think we still have the stuffing for it, though we probably won't ever make it again. It was lovely while it lasted, though the presentation that went along with it wasn't so great. I gave her that best print I made of the Hunger Games symbol with the fire paint, and I think she still has it.  
        Eighth grade I remember less so. In science, I had Ms. Stone, who was a believer in God and taught me that seafloor spreading made more seafloor, though I can't remember now why I ever thought it didn't. Ms. Coffey I remember more- she had a jacket with U2 patches, and I wrote her an essay on Code Name Verity, and my best friend Stacy and I always won Jeopardy, except for the one time that the idiot in front of me bogged us down. I think it was Zach Dawson, but I don't remember clearly. And Mr. Sherry- ohhhh, Mr. Sherry. He taught us English with Ozymandias and The Decemberists and Billy Joel. He was a die-hard Bills, Pink Floyd, Jack White fan, and he taught us The Book Thief in which Cassie Kotas somehow always volunteered to read the chapters with German swearing them, and Animal Farm in which we were taught the Russian Revolution with the aid of Thumper and an eagle and Piglet. And oh, lord, Ms. Eanes's class. Last class of the day, my own little hell. That was the last year Christopher St. Clair attended my school, and he seemed to want to make it the worst. In the last few months, I ended up in the bathroom crying, because I wasn't exactly the most emotionally stable creature in the world. Half of it was things I already knew; the only thing I really remember is the quadratic formula. B equals plus or minus the square root of B squared plus A times C over 2A. I spent most of the rest of the time I wasn't in class in the library; it was my refuge, my strength, and I knew where everything was. The librarians knew me. There I was safe and I could read and be warm and that was where Battle of the Books met and so did STAC-M, that year that we still were getting advance reader books.   
        Battle of the Books merits its own memory dump. Fifth grade. Machiko(?) Tanaka and some other girl whose name started with an S and had a lot of slippery th's in it. I wasn't great, since I didn't read many of the books, but my Peter and the Starcatchers question merited the last candy bar in the bag, which turned out to be the Milky Way they'd told my little group didn't exist in the mass of Snickers. It was lovely. Sixth grade was the first year of being on the 'real' team; that wasn't the year we went to States, but we still did win the Zone competition handily. It was the year of Ms. Cadden giving me a powdered doughnut because it was seven AM and I was at school and hadn't had any breakfast. It was the year of Amy Burton taking my awful question about volcanoes and ripping it up, and me doing a lap around the shelves, taking the standard punishment. Seventh grade, the year of victory, when we WON and went to States and got to go out to Friendly's, and Ms. Fasel bought everyone celebratory milkshakes. We yelled over the phone to Ms. Harrison before we went out that WE HAD WON REGIONALS, and that day was one of my happiest. That was also the year that many, many people brought doughnuts, so I almost never went hungry. Eighth grade was mellow; we went to Regionals but didn't win, and I remember walking into the sun-kissed Bradley (I think? It may have been Bailey) library and looking around and thinking that this was a place that I would be happy in, but of course it didn't pan out. So that was that, and even so I spent the rest of my year in the library, loving my complete mastery of the place and the hundreds of stories that lived in it.


End file.
